If this 'breaks tracing other apps while iTunes is running' um, then don't run iTunes while trying to DTrace/debug your other app. I don't get all the whining, christ.
Are you a troll or do you just have reading difficulties?
The parent said:
although only iTunes currently uses it, that does not stop other software (including software that should not be there) from using it.
Or, to put it more clearly:
A mechanism has been discovered whereby malware (and make no mistake, malware can exist on any platform) can make itself substantially harder to trace. The only saving grace is that this mechanism has been discovered now and can be widely publicised among the security community, rather than two or three years down the line when Mac OS malware applications (which are mostly at the proof of concept stage now) have developed into something more substantial.
DTrace works on processes it's supposed to, and doesn't work on those it's not. I'm happy to agree the implementation of the latter is buggy, but I don't think it's the end of the world or a conspiracy theory.
Until Apple decided they wanted such functionality, there was no such thing as "applications dtrace isn't supposed to work on".
Apple implemented this, and a side effect of their implementation is that probes in DTrace don't work properly if any "don't trace me, bro" app is running. It doesn't even flash up a warning to say "You're running an untraceable application, this will probably break other traces. If this happens, please quit $APPLICATION_NAME and try again."
I'm sure this would be an insurmountable task in BIOS.
Doing pretty much anything is an insurmountable task in the BIOS. The whole design revolves around the idea that the BIOS does very little, but as part of the POST any other devices which have enough logic onboard to be able to kick off a boot process are detected so that logic may be triggered if necessary later.
Modern BIOSes can have modules added by the OEM - this is how the motherboard OEMs like Gigabyte and MSI integrate a standard BIOS from the likes of Award or Phoenix to support fancy things like dual BIOS.
I suspect that this is being driven as a reaction to the OLPC project, and therefore will only be made available to developing nations - nations unlikely to have much in the way of antitrust laws and even if they did they'd be unlikely to look such a gift horse in the mouth.
We don't know which country you're in (and hence which set of regulations you have to adhere to).
We don't know how much data needs to be made available to each office - is it everything? Or is it just a different subset of the total in each office?
We don't know if you're talking about megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes of data. We also don't know how much that data changes on a daily basis.
We don't know if there are any existing factors to consider - be they political or technical (eg. "management almost certainly won't contemplate anything without Microsoft or Cisco plastered all over it").
If it helps, I can tell you what I've done - but I only have two branch offices I need to worry about, no financial regulation and my manager is more interested in saving money on server and client access licenses than buying whatever Microsoft deem to be the Next Big Thing . Each branch office has its own server running Debian Etch as a VMWare host and a number of virtual machines - including a fileserver, DNS and LDAP slaved from head office for authentication. About the only thing that needs backup is the fileserver, and that is done by nightly rsync to head office, and thence to tape. Provided the data doesn't change too drastically (at a rough guess, I can probably handle up to 2-3GB of changes per day while remaining within the backup window) I should be OK. You could probably achieve a similar net effect with Active Directory and DFS.
The home user buys a PC which has an OEM version of Windows on. They either warez Office or they get a student copy. Seldom do they buy the full price copy.
The business user buys a PC which has an OEM version of Windows on. But the business user wants to guarantee that they can use the same version of Windows on all their PCs regardless of what they shipped with and use some sort of imaging, so they have to go out and buy the business Windows upgrade license - the terms of which say "You must buy one license for every Windows PC you have, regardless of whether or not it came with an OEM license for the version of Windows this covers".
The business user also buys licenses for Office, Exchange, possibly Sharepoint, SQL server. They also buy Client Access Licenses.
I still maintain that the business user is Microsoft's core market.
Just to clarify - most Unix backup systems are wrappers around tar - and if they're not, they're based around the same basic idea. "Remember to fire up this program to run the backup every day/week/month" - or even if you automate it "remember to change the media unless you want to overwrite the last backup".
The same is true in Windows.
But Time Machine is "Computer, use this external drive for backups" and from that point on it's the OS's problem.
But the key difference - one which Linux users (and to a certain extent Windows users) fail to appreciate - is that the implementation is so damn slick that Apple users may actually wind up making backups and be able to find their files.
As opposed to "having the facility to make backups but only remembering to about 10% of the time" or "theoretically able to find files with a given piece of content but for some immensely frustrating reason the search frequently fails to find something that you know damn well ought to be there".
Very true. Over the course of the last 24 hours, Northern Rock shares are up 25%.
But 12 months ago, Northern Rock shares were touching 1200p each. Today they're worth 88p each. That's more than a 90% drop. Take a look at the graph for the last years' share prices here:
I will buy a product from any random manufacturer as long as it's:
Not a famously cheap and nasty manufacturer who wouldn't know "quality" if the big green quality monster came slavering into the managing director's office and bit him on the bum.
Not from a manufacturer who may not be famously cheap and nasty, but is responsible for a number of things I've bought in the recent past causing me more hassle than is appropriate. (Sony, I'm looking at you - why can I never get a replacement Vaio battery even if the laptop it fits is under a year old? I know from a previous job that it takes approximately 5-6 weeks to surface freight a pallet full of goods to the UK from the far east, so I've got a good idea where your constant "5-6 week" lead time comes from.)
their solution is always the same for every problem - wipe the machine - a tad inconvenient for me, but pretty efficient for them I suppose.
Wiping the machine is a 100% guaranteed way to fix a software issue, and if the systems are properly set up it only takes a few minutes.
It really doesn't take very long before it's the easiest solution to a lot of problems.
Now, if you rely on a bunch of software which isn't installed as part of the standard build - this is an issue which IT should be aware of and take steps to fix. (note: I said "should". I'm aware of how the real world works...)
If, on the other hand, you're keeping significant amounts of data on your PC which is important to the business - well, then the problem doesn't lie with IT (unless they're making it prohibitively difficult to store data on a server). Very few businesses back up individual PCs, and most consider them to be essentially disposable.
In windows I'm sure you can set the time between warning appearing and shutdown ocuring. Give 600 seconds warning and you could probably shutdown 90% of the machines overnight.
You're assuming that 100% of machines in use are doing something interactive (and therefore have someone sat at them). This is frequently not the case.
This is the Daily Mail. Its readers don't use the Internet because they're afraid of the assorted pornographers, paedophiles, perverts, phishermen and other things beginning with the letter "P".
Come back and talk about this in twenty years' time, when whites are a minority in the U.S. and the U.K....
They already are in some parts of the UK. Luton and IIRC Bradford immediately spring to mind, but there are significant non-white areas in almost every major city in the UK.
Now, I don't have a problem with this provided everyone pulls their weight (ie. doesn't sponge off benefits) and doesn't go around terrorising the rest of the area. But the Daily Mail does have a tendency to portray more or less anyone who isn't white English middle class as living off benefits, setting fire to cars and mugging helpless old ladies. Either that or they're taking our jobs, setting fire to cars and mugging helpless old ladies.
There are a few exceptions. Most professionals (provided they can speak English), but particularly doctors are unlikely to be picked on by that magnificent bastion of unbiased journalism.
Hasbro's core business is "making old fashioned board games to sell through retail".
This doesn't really gel with "writing a computerised version of a board game with no obvious way of making money out of it", and if they were to do a half-decent job could actually impact sales of the dead tree version.
Slashdot Mirror
If this 'breaks tracing other apps while iTunes is running' um, then don't run iTunes while trying to DTrace/debug your other app. I don't get all the whining, christ.
Are you a troll or do you just have reading difficulties?
The parent said:
although only iTunes currently uses it, that does not stop other software (including software that should not be there) from using it.
Or, to put it more clearly:
A mechanism has been discovered whereby malware (and make no mistake, malware can exist on any platform) can make itself substantially harder to trace. The only saving grace is that this mechanism has been discovered now and can be widely publicised among the security community, rather than two or three years down the line when Mac OS malware applications (which are mostly at the proof of concept stage now) have developed into something more substantial.
DTrace works on processes it's supposed to, and doesn't work on those it's not. I'm happy to agree the implementation of the latter is buggy, but I don't think it's the end of the world or a conspiracy theory.
Until Apple decided they wanted such functionality, there was no such thing as "applications dtrace isn't supposed to work on".
Apple implemented this, and a side effect of their implementation is that probes in DTrace don't work properly if any "don't trace me, bro" app is running. It doesn't even flash up a warning to say "You're running an untraceable application, this will probably break other traces. If this happens, please quit $APPLICATION_NAME and try again."
I'm sure this would be an insurmountable task in BIOS.
Doing pretty much anything is an insurmountable task in the BIOS. The whole design revolves around the idea that the BIOS does very little, but as part of the POST any other devices which have enough logic onboard to be able to kick off a boot process are detected so that logic may be triggered if necessary later.
Modern BIOSes can have modules added by the OEM - this is how the motherboard OEMs like Gigabyte and MSI integrate a standard BIOS from the likes of Award or Phoenix to support fancy things like dual BIOS.
Sanded and polished turd with a bit of air freshener and shaped to look like a Hershey bar.
Drifting off topic here, but it probably tastes like a Hershey bar too.
I suspect that this is being driven as a reaction to the OLPC project, and therefore will only be made available to developing nations - nations unlikely to have much in the way of antitrust laws and even if they did they'd be unlikely to look such a gift horse in the mouth.
Free training is not monopoly subsidising. Its just a different business model, they charge for the software and give free training.
It is when they're not charging for the software either.
We don't know which country you're in (and hence which set of regulations you have to adhere to).
We don't know how much data needs to be made available to each office - is it everything? Or is it just a different subset of the total in each office?
We don't know if you're talking about megabytes, gigabytes or terabytes of data. We also don't know how much that data changes on a daily basis.
We don't know if there are any existing factors to consider - be they political or technical (eg. "management almost certainly won't contemplate anything without Microsoft or Cisco plastered all over it").
If it helps, I can tell you what I've done - but I only have two branch offices I need to worry about, no financial regulation and my manager is more interested in saving money on server and client access licenses than buying whatever Microsoft deem to be the Next Big Thing . Each branch office has its own server running Debian Etch as a VMWare host and a number of virtual machines - including a fileserver, DNS and LDAP slaved from head office for authentication. About the only thing that needs backup is the fileserver, and that is done by nightly rsync to head office, and thence to tape. Provided the data doesn't change too drastically (at a rough guess, I can probably handle up to 2-3GB of changes per day while remaining within the backup window) I should be OK. You could probably achieve a similar net effect with Active Directory and DFS.
The home user buys a PC which has an OEM version of Windows on. They either warez Office or they get a student copy. Seldom do they buy the full price copy.
The business user buys a PC which has an OEM version of Windows on. But the business user wants to guarantee that they can use the same version of Windows on all their PCs regardless of what they shipped with and use some sort of imaging, so they have to go out and buy the business Windows upgrade license - the terms of which say "You must buy one license for every Windows PC you have, regardless of whether or not it came with an OEM license for the version of Windows this covers".
The business user also buys licenses for Office, Exchange, possibly Sharepoint, SQL server. They also buy Client Access Licenses.
I still maintain that the business user is Microsoft's core market.
Just to clarify - most Unix backup systems are wrappers around tar - and if they're not, they're based around the same basic idea. "Remember to fire up this program to run the backup every day/week/month" - or even if you automate it "remember to change the media unless you want to overwrite the last backup".
The same is true in Windows.
But Time Machine is "Computer, use this external drive for backups" and from that point on it's the OS's problem.
(you know, those places where the bulk of MSFT's cutomer base can be found?)
I really have my doubts on that.
Consider how many people have a computer on their desk.
Consider how many of those computers are running Windows.
Consider how many of those people don't have a computer at home.
Honestly?
Very little.
But the key difference - one which Linux users (and to a certain extent Windows users) fail to appreciate - is that the implementation is so damn slick that Apple users may actually wind up making backups and be able to find their files.
As opposed to "having the facility to make backups but only remembering to about 10% of the time" or "theoretically able to find files with a given piece of content but for some immensely frustrating reason the search frequently fails to find something that you know damn well ought to be there".
but Northern Rock shares are up 25%.
Very true. Over the course of the last 24 hours, Northern Rock shares are up 25%.
But 12 months ago, Northern Rock shares were touching 1200p each. Today they're worth 88p each. That's more than a 90% drop. Take a look at the graph for the last years' share prices here:
http://www.citywire.co.uk/Shares/ShareFactsheet.aspx?InstrumentID=2375
Right now Northern Rock shares are only for those with brass balls so big they need a wheelbarrow to carry them around in.
The generally accepted UK use of the word "billion" is "thousand million".
Whichever way you read it, £24bn is a fair bit of cash.
I will buy a product from any random manufacturer as long as it's:
The PS3 is pretty much silent, has more stuffed into the box, and has a nearly flawless record!
For all Sony's faults, they are still fundamentally an electronics engineering and manufacturing firm.
For all Microsoft's faults, they are still fundamentally a marketing firm - albeit a remarkably successful one with just one client.
Considering KDE has a more polished GUI than either MacOS or Windows
It's not GUI polish that's the issue.
It's little things like Time Machine and a search facility (Spotlight) which actually works.
their solution is always the same for every problem - wipe the machine - a tad inconvenient for me, but pretty efficient for them I suppose.
Wiping the machine is a 100% guaranteed way to fix a software issue, and if the systems are properly set up it only takes a few minutes.
It really doesn't take very long before it's the easiest solution to a lot of problems.
Now, if you rely on a bunch of software which isn't installed as part of the standard build - this is an issue which IT should be aware of and take steps to fix. (note: I said "should". I'm aware of how the real world works...)
If, on the other hand, you're keeping significant amounts of data on your PC which is important to the business - well, then the problem doesn't lie with IT (unless they're making it prohibitively difficult to store data on a server). Very few businesses back up individual PCs, and most consider them to be essentially disposable.
Is WOL not reliable?
I haven't tried it lately, but certainly a few years ago the answer to that was "no, it's not very reliable at all".
In windows I'm sure you can set the time between warning appearing and shutdown ocuring. Give 600 seconds warning and you could probably shutdown 90% of the machines overnight.
You're assuming that 100% of machines in use are doing something interactive (and therefore have someone sat at them). This is frequently not the case.
This is the Daily Mail. Its readers don't use the Internet because they're afraid of the assorted pornographers, paedophiles, perverts, phishermen and other things beginning with the letter "P".
Which is probably why it is attractive to some people: They don't want to think.
Either that or they don't want others to think.
Come back and talk about this in twenty years' time, when whites are a minority in the U.S. and the U.K....
They already are in some parts of the UK. Luton and IIRC Bradford immediately spring to mind, but there are significant non-white areas in almost every major city in the UK.
Now, I don't have a problem with this provided everyone pulls their weight (ie. doesn't sponge off benefits) and doesn't go around terrorising the rest of the area. But the Daily Mail does have a tendency to portray more or less anyone who isn't white English middle class as living off benefits, setting fire to cars and mugging helpless old ladies. Either that or they're taking our jobs, setting fire to cars and mugging helpless old ladies.
There are a few exceptions. Most professionals (provided they can speak English), but particularly doctors are unlikely to be picked on by that magnificent bastion of unbiased journalism.
It's still theft if someone steals from your house while you left the door open.
Well, if nothing else such a proposal would probably work wonders for the proportion of men:women in the games industry.
Hasbro's core business is "making old fashioned board games to sell through retail".
This doesn't really gel with "writing a computerised version of a board game with no obvious way of making money out of it", and if they were to do a half-decent job could actually impact sales of the dead tree version.
Why would they want to do a half-decent job?